ing minds
of the nation it may not be easy to determine. It was only after the
adventurous explorations of the French pioneers, traders, and
friars--men of like boundless enthusiasm and courage--had been crowned
by the achievement of La Salle, who first of men traversed the two great
waterways of the continent from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of
Mexico, that the amazing possibilities of it were fully revealed. But,
whosesoever scheme it was, a more magnificent project of empire, secular
and spiritual, has never entered into the heart of man. It seems to have
been native to the American soil, springing up in the hearts of the
French pioneer explorers themselves;[18:1] but by its grandeur, and at
the same time its unity, it was of a sort to delight the souls of Sully
and Richelieu and of their masters. Under thin and dubious claims by
right of discovery, through the immense energy and daring of her
explorers, the heroic zeal of her missionaries, and not so much by the
prowess of her soldiers as by her craft in diplomacy with savage tribes,
France was to assert and make good her title to the basin of the St.
Lawrence and the lakes, and the basin of the Mississippi and the Gulf of
Mexico. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the
Mississippi, through the core of the continent, was to be drawn a cordon
of posts, military, commercial, and religious, with other outlying
stations at strategic points both eastward and westward. The only
external interference with this scheme that could be apprehended at its
inception was from the Spanish colonies, already decaying and shrinking
within their boundaries to the west and to the southeast, and from a
puny little English settlement started only a year before, with a
doubtful hold on life, on the bank of the James River. A dozen years
later a pitiably feeble company of Pilgrims shall make their landing at
Plymouth to try the not hopeful experiment of living in the wilderness,
and a settlement of Swedes in Delaware and of Hollanders on the Hudson
shall be added to the incongruous, unconcerted, mutually jealous
plantations that begin to take root along the Atlantic seaboard. Not
only grandeur and sagacity of conception, but success in achievement, is
illustrated by the comparative area occupied by the three great European
powers on the continent of North America at the end of a century and a
half from the founding of Quebec in 1608. Dividing the continent into
twenty